Fox News is Misinformer of the Year for 2020, the first time @mmfa has given the distinction to the network as a whole.

This year was a low point in Fox’s shameful history, and none of its employees should ever live it down.
mediamatters.org/fox-news/misin…
Fox’s misinformation had a direct impact on the lives of every single American this year, whether they watched the network or not. The nation suffered the consequences of the feedback loop between President Trump and his personal propaganda outlet.
Fox spent 2020 recklessly minimizing the pandemic as it took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. It’s impossible to calculate how many might still be alive if the network had treated the virus as a real threat to the health of its viewers and the general public.
Trump's Fox obsession ensured that the federal government’s response would track the complaints, obsessions, and blind spots of its right-wing ideologues.
Most dangerous of all, Fox’s promotion of Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist with a contrarian take, attracted Trump’s attention. Trump liked that Atlas told him what he wanted to hear -- that the virus was no big deal -- so he gave him a position on the WH coronavirus task force.
Fox's propagandists not only helped wreck the response to a deadly pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. They also tried to drown a movement for justice out of racism and fear, and, as the year came to a close, waged an assault on America’s democracy.
For Fox's executives and on-air commentators, mass death was simply the cost of doing business. They betrayed their viewers and endangered their fellow Americans because they wanted to protect the president and preserve their position as his state TV outlet of choice.
Fox News is 2020’s Misinformer of the Year.

mediamatters.org/fox-news/misin…

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More from @MattGertz

23 Dec 20
It seems legitimately difficult to negotiate when the president doesn't care about the public, is uninterested in policy details, has no stable goals, doesn't empower his appointees to actually speak for him, and can change his mind about a bill based on cable news segments!
Do people still think Pelosi turned down an actual $1.8 trillion stimulus deal with Mnuchin that Trump would have signed or nah?
Some screengrabs criticizing the COVID relief package from a few of Trump's favorite Fox News shows from Monday night and Tuesday morning. By Tuesday night, he was publicly attacking it.
Read 6 tweets
23 Dec 20
I've updated the @mmfa tracker for Trump's pardon pipeline -- at least 16 of his acts of clemency are linked to Fox: mediamatters.org/donald-trump/t…

Papadopoulos
Flynn
Stone
Blagojevich
Gallagher
Golsteyn
Lorance
Behenna
Saucier
D’Souza
Arpaio
Libby
Rubashkin
Milken
Kerik
Stanton
@mmfa We're not there yet to add them but seems plausible that there's a Hegseth connection to the Blackwater pardons mediamatters.org/pete-hegseth/f…
Read 5 tweets
22 Dec 20
A Mount Rushmore of bad takes this year from the WSJ opinion section.
How it started. How it's going.
About 200,000 Americans died of COVID-19 in the period between WSJ publishing Mike Pence's op-ed saying the media was exaggerating the threat of the virus and Scott Atlas' op-ed saying the media was exaggerating the threat of the virus.
Read 5 tweets
21 Dec 20
Saturday

Left, OAN, 2:57 p.m.
Right, Trump, 2:59 p.m.
Saturday.

Jesse Watters hosted Peter Navarro to talk about his insane "fraud" document and Trump was on it. washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/…

Left, Fox's Watters World, 7:29 p.m.
Right, Trump, 8:18 p.m.
jfc
Read 5 tweets
17 Dec 20
For the second consecutive night, the president of the United States was up after 1 a.m. tweeting deranged OAN chyrons.

Left, OAN News, 12:09 a.m.
Right, Trump, 1:14 a.m.
Here are some other screengrabs from that hour.
"One America News will officially not be calling Joe Biden the president-elect... we are the only broadcast news network out there with the integrity to report that this election isn't over. Fox News caved, to no one's surprise."
Read 4 tweets
15 Dec 20
A "news" show about the "opinion" programs.
An hour later.
Read 4 tweets

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